Many Are Cold, but Few Are Frozen

Abrahamic religions delight in telling you all the horrible things that will happen to the unrighteous after they die. When I was a kid, someone told me that Hell would be a thousand times more painful than burning your finger in a candle flame, and that the pain would last forever. I worried about it, briefly.

Recently, I learned that bad things can happen to unrighteous Buddhists too. At a mountain temple at the Terelj National Park, I saw paintings of demons behaving badly. They reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch.

Demons just seem to be everywhere

I've always thought that a bad Buddhist would be reborn as a lower creature, like a rat or a slug. I didn't know there was a Buddhist version of Hell to worry about. I wonder what you have to do to get there.

Luckily, I wasn't too scarred by the stories about Hell I heard in my childhood. How seriously can you take the views of people who would be astonished by a paper clip?